New .tel TLD Now In Use

rockwood reports that the .tel top level domain has been deployed, "in a first attempt at pushing the recently approved .tel... The top-level domain .tel was approved by ICANN as a sponsored TLD launching on Wednesday, December 3, 2008 to trademark owners of national effect and on February 3, 2009 to anyone who wishes to apply. Its main purpose is as a single management and publishing point for 'internet communication' services, providing a global contacts directory service by housing all types of contact information directly in the DNS."

Comments

.mobi?

[larry bagina]

sounds like .mobi. And probably as irrelevant.

Uh, what?

[TheRaven64]

How is that meant to work? I already use existing domain names for 'Internet communication' services, like email and IM. I can already use DNS to map telephone numbers to these with RFC 2916 or map arbitrary domains to them with RFC 2915. So, what exactly, is the point of .tel?

Enum

[Imagix]

Uh, didn't this used to be called Enum? (e164.arpa.)?

Re:Huh?

[onefriedrice]

Perhaps by DNS space he means the fact that organizations who want to register their website under all the TLD's in order to protect their name will have yet another TLD. As the number of domains that point to the same IP address increases, so does the number of pointless DNS requests.